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I've just been watching a couple of episodes of Poker After Dark with Mike Matusow. He claims to be the unluckiest poker player around, but I know he's the second unluckiest one around behind me as the unluckiest one.

Anyway, one thing he did say, which struck a cord with me, was about posting your suck outs as well as your bad beats, so here's todays suck out:

If I knew this was going to happen, I would've started doing this months ago.

Since posting up my first Bad Beat post, I've not been doing too badly. Currently Titan Poker sucks (ie. this is were I'm getting bad beats) but Pokerstars is currently being good for the most part.

Today's bad beat would be a hand from Titan Poker but I'm not in front of the computer I play on (a hand were I had pocket sevens with a Ten high rainbow board (ie. no flush possibilities) and ran into someone with pocket Aces!).

Anyway, this one is from Pokerstars and isn't as bad as some of the bad beats I've had recently. Here goes:

I've found out in the last 24 hours that despite working in a sector that is relatively secure in the current times, and despite working for a company that turned a good profit last year, it doesn't make you immune to being made redundant.

And so it was, yesterday afternoon, without any prior indication or warning that the department I work in was told that 2/3's of the staff in the department will be made redundant in the coming months and the duties of these positions will be re-allocated to staff working in Romania and the Philippines. Welcome to the world-wide economy.

You see, I work for a company that is one of a group of companies owned by a bigger, parent company. As a group of companies there are offiices and staff in numerous locations across Europe including Bucharest in Romania through to the Czech Republic, Poland and west ward to the UK, Ireland and Spain, as well as offices in the USA and the Philippines.

Since we were taken over by this parent company a couple of years ago, we have been allowed to run as a separate company, but now, all of a sudden, they seem to be content with ripping the technical support departments to shreds in the name of saving money (or more likely to maximize their profit margins). This is a clear and blatant attempt to do this as they have the audacity to openly confirm that they are taking these duties and giving them to staff in Romania and the Philippines, areas of the world that I would image are not as well paid as here in the UK.

This does a disservice to our customers as support is effectively being out-sourced to a foreign country. I guess the parent company (which is German) didn't see the uproar in this country a few years ago when the banks out-sourced their customer support to foreign countries (which is why UK Banks make such a point now about the fact that their call centres are UK based) and this does a disservice to us, their staff, by basically saying that we don't care how much hard work you have done for us, thanks, but goodbye.

Still there is a 1/3 chance that I will keep my job, but if I'm as fortunate in this as I am in my poker playing at the moment, then a suppose I need to get my CV updated :-(

Among the 13 charities that operate under the D.E.C are The British Red Cross, Christian Aid, Oxfam and World Vision. These and the other charities are well established organisations who quite possibly know a lot, lot more about disaster relief than the BBC do. In recent times, working under the D.E.C. these charities have raised millions of pounds to help in situations such as the Congo (DR) Crisis, the Myanmar (Burma) Cyclone disaster, the Bangladesh Cyclone disaster and the Indian Ocean Tsunami Earthquake.

The statement issued by the BBC's Director-General then goes on to say the following:

"But there is a second more fundamental reason why we decided that we should not broadcast the appeal at present. This is because Gaza remains a major ongoing news story,..."

So now, not only are they questioning the compentency of 13 of the world's most regarded aid agencies, they are now putting news before the lives, health and well-being of thousands of people in desperate need of help.

This is a very sick and twisted view of the world and definately not what anyone (apart from the BBC) would call impartial.

As a aside, it appears that some of the critism may be deflected from the BBC today as there are numerous reports that Sky will not be broadcasting the aid appeal either. This, though, is not suprising if you consider that Sky (otherwise know as British Sky Broadcasting) in the UK is a sister company to Fox News in the USA. Nuff said I think.

The other thing to bear in mind here is that the BBC is meant to be there to report the news and not to BE the news.

It's a interesting article essentially calling on disenfranchised Labour MP's to stand as independant candidates at the next General Election and comes with an assurance that those that MP's that did this and "stood for meaningful action to combat climate change" would not have a Green Party candidate stand against them.

Whilst an interesting thought, why not take this idea a step further and get the Green Party to send an open letter, say via the newspapers, to all Labour MP's (and Liberal Democrat and Conservative MP's come to that) who stand for, or have any kind of concern over environmental issues to join the Green Party and stand as a Green Party candidate at the next General Election. One of the problems the Green Party has is getting it's message out to the public through the media (particularly the TV networks). With something like this, it would be very hard for the media to ignore.

I have spent some time putting together some online calendars for some of the big poker tours and another calendar of big one-off poker events and they are now available for those who are interested.

I've compiled them through Google Calendar so each calendar is available in 3 formats; XML (like an RSS feed), iCalendar (can be viewed in a desktop calendar such as iCal or Mozilla Lightning/Sunbird) or HTML (that can be embedded directly into a website).